Benedict Vitai

“No world is rock real. As a certain poet in Dublin once said to me when, as a young journalist, I was emerging one enchanted evening, from a reception in a fashion-modelling agency, and had marvelled to him about the unreality, or it seemed to me to be, of the world in which those beautiful creations pirouetted.
No world, the poet said sadly, is rock real.”
― Benedict Kiely, Drink to the Bird

“I miss the freedom of London. I do miss the mixture. I think I will go back sometime with Alexandra and show her the city. She will understand why I went. And perhaps why I came back.”
― Craig Taylor, Londoners: The Days and Nights of London Now - As Told by Those Who Love It, Hate It, Live It, Left It, and Long for It

“Plain blunt people may be a little afraid of formal music. But I have lived to regret that failure. Every man [or woman], barbarian or civilised, should play at least one musical instrument. And have a trade: cobbling or carpentry or whatever.”
― Benedict Kiely, Drink to the Bird

“When you do a departure along the northerly from Gatwick, you get a real sense of humanity. As you climb out over the city, you can see masses of people down there, all the buildings and all the built-up area are lit up. And at night-time you’ve got the M25, which circles London, and you can see all these little beady lights that are dotted around in a very windy circle and you realize that it’s six o’clock around the M25. Day by day they’re down there and you just think of the effort, all the effort, just to get by. It’s a tough city. All those little dots, those beads of light, like a rosary, all those people, wanting to get in, wanting to get out.”
― Craig Taylor, Londoners: The Days and Nights of London Now - As Told by Those Who Love It, Hate It, Live It, Left It, and Long for It